


In Motion

by weakinteraction



Category: Metropolis: The Chase Suite - Janelle Monae
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-17 16:58:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14835594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Cindi is on the run.





	In Motion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snowynight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowynight/gifts).



Cindi is in motion. She is always in motion, has always been in motion.

Not so long ago, she danced furiously as she sang for the city's great and not-so-good. Now she runs through the endless streets from their various enforcers: Polis officers, Droid Control agents, and bounty hunters hired by criminal gangs and corporate behemoths alike, not that there's any real distinction between them.

The details change, the motion remains.

Even when she appears completely still, Cindi is always in motion, her brain shuffling exotic subatomic particles at speeds far faster than even she can really comprehend.

And that one time, when she shorted out at the auction, was when they fizzed and popped more than they ever had.

Cindi is in motion, running through the streets.

But while the streets might go on forever, Cindi cannot. Her power core is running low, and her backup supercapacitor banks will only provide a brief burst of full functionality. Her consciousness is filled with the criticality of the situation, her designed-in survival imperatives screaming at her to find the nearest charging station. But avoiding capture is _more_ than a survival imperative. After her experience at the auction, she _understands_ in a way she never has before. If they take her back -- whether as a charred heap of cybernetic junk, or to be reprogrammed -- it could be the end of hope for a generation.

She has switched off her microwave senses to avoid detection, but she can still spot her fellow androids amongst the various curfew-breakers out on the street. There are a hundred little tells: the regular way they blink; the excellent posture; the infrared signatures that are too smooth, due to a cooling system far more efficient than human blood ...

Her own infrared signature is all over the place, she knows, as her systems desperately try to conserve what energy she has left, even beginning to use tiny heat differentials to eke out a little more sustenance for her core circuits. She knows that she must recharge soon.

Even her visual processor is getting in on the act, interrupting her visual field with `CRITICAL` warnings.

As she reaches the group of female-patterned droids on the next corner, she tries to put together a coherent plea for help. But all that emerges is a weak, "Power ... Power up."

* * *

Her body shut down almost completely, maintaining only her least-draining receptor system -- audio -- on the capacitor reserve.

It was only later that she reviewed the recording.

_"Are you OK, honey?"_

_"Holy shit, Julienne, that's an Alpha Platinum."_

_"Not just any Alpha Platinum," a third voice says. "That's_ Cindi Mayweather _."_

_"No, it can't be. ... Can it?"_

_"She's almost completely out of charge. Come on, help me get her to the charging station."_

_"No, you can't charge her."_

_"Necessitita 36425, you are_ not _saying we should turn her in."_

 _"I'm saying we_ would _be turning her in if we hook her up."_

_"Shit, Julienne, she's right. Her ID would be broadcast to the whole network."_

_The talking stopped, replaced by over a minute of indistinct noises._

_"Can you hear me in there, Cindi?" It was the one called Necessitita. "It might hurt a little, but_ this _is a firmware upgrade for your recharging port. It'll make you appear to be a sanitation drone as far as the system's concerned. You'll charge more slowly, and it'll be a more variable supply because you won't be as high a priority, but it'll get the job done."_

She hadn't felt anything at all at the time, her senses deadened to the world, but now that she is awake again and reviewing the recording, she is aware of the port tickling.

It will take several hours for her to recharge fully, far longer than she was used to.

Does she have several hours? How far behind are the drones and the dropships that had been pursuing her?

The answer comes all too soon, as wailing sirens and flashing lights fill the air.

Cindi starts to disconnect herself but the droid she first fell into -- Julienne, by implication -- forces her back into the port. "We'll handle this," she says.

Cindi feels powerless as she listens, watches out of the corner of her eye, to the conversation between Julienne and the Polis officers.

It seems to be going well -- Julienne convincing them that nothing strange has happened tonight -- when Cindi hears the words which send a shudder through her system far worse than any voltage variation could ever be.

"If that's the case, you will of course submit to a full screening by our colleagues from droid control."

Droid control are here, and Cindi is again beginning to rip herself away from the charging port. But even as she has only begun to move, one of the others -- Necessitita, she suspects -- shoots her a warning glare. If she moves now, they _will_ spot her.

She watches Julienne's expression go blank in the mirrored face of the robed droid control operative.

Waits.

Any moment now, the operative will raise an arm and point the Polis officers towards where she is hidden.

Any moment now.

They must have scanned Julienne's entire system by now.

And then, finally, it happens: the operative turns and walks away, wordlessly as ever. The Polis, slightly nonplussed, eventually follow.

Julienne comes back. "What's going on?" she says. "Who's this in our-- Holy shit, is this Cindi Mayweather?"

Cindi realises that Julienne must have wiped her own short-term memory to avoid betraying her to droid control.

"I'll explain in a moment," Necessitita tells Julienne. She turns to Cindi and says, "You're safe here. Take all the time you need to recharge."

Cindi allows herself to slip into a recharging coma.

* * *

And it's as though she was there again, at the auction, at the moment when it happened.

Her mildly subversive lyrics were tolerable to the assembled dignitaries because it was so clear that she and all the other Alpha Platinums being auctioned off were under control. Cindi singing about freedom only served to add a frisson of danger to the proceedings.

That all changed very quickly when it happened. Her circuitry overloading, beginning to levitate uncontrollably. But the external symptoms were as nothing to what had been going on inside her own mind: it had felt as though her thought processes were breaching the barriers between quantum realities, connecting with the brains of all the other Cindi Mayweathers out there in the multiverse.

And she'd seen one of them, one of her, under a moonlit sky. And she'd _known_ , with absolute certainty, that this Cindi was free.

Perhaps it had just been an illusion, the sparking of a malfunctioning exitronic network. That was certainly the official line. But perhaps she really had reached across the divide into a better world.

What she'd realised was that it didn't matter. Whether she'd seen them or not, the basic fact of living in a branching multiverse was no longer in dispute in serious circles. What people thought through less clearly were the implications. Yes, a better world existed out there, somewhere sideways in time. But there was also always a possibility of the future of _this_ world, the one you found yourself in, being made that better world in turn.

Not just one, but many moons, lighting the way to freedom.

One day, she will liberate them all -- androids, clones and humans alike, whether they are conscious of the need for liberation or not.

* * *

When she awakes, they ask her to stay. She refuses; they ask again.

"I would be putting you all at risk," Cindi says. "I'm not willing to do that."

"We get to choose our own risks," Julienne says, and Cindi cannot argue with someone who wiped their own memory to protect her.

"She has other places to be." It's Necessitita. She is carrying a tiny data wafer, which she passes to Cindi.

Cindi scans it: it's a set of co-ordinates, for a dark warehouse out in Sector Fourteen. A very specific set of co-ordinates, down to the shelf. "Where did this come from?"

"A friend," Necessitita says. "Well, no. Not a friend. But someone who works for someone who works for someone ... who I am certain is not fucking with you."

"Whatever this is, I need to see it for myself," Cindi says, before she crushes the wafer in her fist.

As she turns to leave, Julienne calls, "Cindi!" Cindi turns back. "Power up, sister."

Cindi nods. "Power up."

Her plea for help has turned into a slogan. It has already begun.

* * *

It is the next night before she makes it to Sector Fourteen.

The building is nothing special, just another in the rows of warehouses that dominate this part of town, where the trade-off between low land values and an acceptable level of fibre access is just right.

Drones buzz overhead, emerging from the shafts on the roof before flying on their way to their customers. She minimises her infrared emissivity, lest their scanners have been co-opted by her pursuers. Although each one has only the minimal senses it needs to navigate to its destination safely, the density of them here is sufficient for interferometric techniques to find her.

The curfew does not apply to the drones. It would be unthinkable for the rich and famous in the Central District not to have instant access to whatever they desired at any time of day or night.

Which is exactly why places like this have become centres for contraband. Because sometimes the desires of the rich and famous are not compatible with the letter of the law.

She steps into the darkened interior, carefully dodging the whizzing robotic arms taking items from shelves and delivering them to the parcelling stations.

She is not alone. She risks a brief lidar pulse and detects at least two dozen other humanoid forms doing the same dangerous dance. More than would have been found in a warehouse such as this in the days before full automation, ironically enough. While the criminal enterprise that they work for has hacked the inventory and delivery algorithms, they still need bodies on the ground to intercept the legitimate goods and replace them with the contraband.

Usually human bodies, desperate enough to take the risks involved for their small cut of the takings, algorithmically calculated of course. There are plenty of humans who work in "fulfilment".

She curses herself for not having thought to obtain night vision goggles to blend in better. But it is not unknown for androids to do this work, and the risks of a direct encounter with any of them is low.

She wonders idly which of them it is who secreted the item she is looking for, whether they realise that it was never collected by the warehouse systems.

She follows the directions she has been given to a lesser used part of the warehouse. Antique musical recordings in optical formats are closely packed together, their RFID tags facing outwards.

The tag she needs turns out to be an old recording by one of the artists who was weighted high in her patterning matrix. Even one she's sometimes given as an "influence" when asked in interviews.

Coincidence? Someone with a sense of humour? Or an obscure sort of warning?

She reaches out and removes it from the shelf, removes the thin disc from its plastic case.

For a moment she looks the very stereotype of the killer robot, as red laser light shoots from her eyes, albeit only at the low intensity required to scan the data.

Even so, it is the brightest light source anywhere in the dark warehouse. She knows she should have waited until she was safely away. Especially as this is not the disc she's looking for. She takes the one next to it, scans the data.

 _Alpha Platinum Protocols_ , reads the header. _Unexpurgated._

She discards the disc, the data all in her head already. It is highly compressed, will take time to disentangle. But one thing is already clear: the Alpha Platinum project was not simply an attempt to produce a high-end entertainment droid. The maestros who had created her had been attempting nothing less than to create a droid with free will. But what they had discovered was that the droids had always had it, that to achieve their goal they did not have to _add_ anything, merely take away certain limitations from their neural networks. Frightened, they had added those exact same limitations to Cindi, wiped her memory, and dumped her into the dead-end post she had risen from.

 _All droids have free will._ Cindi thinks of Julienne, choosing to wipe her own memory.

She has her past now, has the truth that has been hidden from her and all her kind.

It is time to leave the warehouse. She heads out quickly into the moonlit night.

Cindi is always in motion. But you can never be sure where you're going unless you know your starting point.


End file.
